Gun Sales Up Six Straight Months: What FFL Dealers Do Now

The Two Numbers That Define August

The August 2026 NSSF-adjusted NICS figure came in at 1,115,410 — a 2.2% increase over the 1,091,342 recorded in August 2025, and the sixth consecutive month of year-over-year growth. The unadjusted FBI figure for the same month was 1,917,379, up 10.0% from 1,743,509 a year earlier. Year to date, adjusted checks are running 3.7% ahead of 2025. (Sources: NSSF-Adjusted NICS Background Checks for August 2026, The Outdoor Wire, Sept. 4, 2026; Sporting Goods Intelligence, September 2026.)

The trade press has framed it the same way: 2026 is on pace to be the first year firearm sales have actually grown since the 2020 pandemic surge, and American Rifleman counted the run as a seventh straight monthly gain in its Sept. 13 report. Whether you count six months or seven depends on which NICS series you use. The direction does not depend on anything.

One caveat I repeat every month because it matters when you set inventory: NICS background checks are not firearms sold. State permit rechecks, pawn redemptions, and NFA transactions all sit inside that number. The adjusted series strips permit rechecks out, which is why I lead with it — but nobody should model unit demand off it directly.

The Suppressor Shock Is the Real Story of the Quarter

Buried inside the same release is the number that should change how you staff the counter: the August 2026 NFA figure was 185,744, up 201.6% from 61,594 a year earlier. Form 1 and Form 4 volume tripled in twelve months.

The cause is a federal district court ruling in Texas on Aug. 5, 2026 that effectively removed silencers from the National Firearms Act's restricted list. Because DOJ did not appeal inside the seven-day stay, qualifying customers have been able to take delivery of suppressors on a standard 4473 since Aug. 13 — the same form used for a firearm.

The catch is that "qualifying" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Per reporting at the time, buyers must live in one of the 27 states that does not impose its own NFA stamp requirement, and must either belong to a plaintiff organization or buy a suppressor supplied by one of the plaintiffs in Silencer Shop v. ATF and Jensen v. ATF. ATF and DOJ went quiet on requests for guidance, and DOJ had until Oct. 5 to appeal or seek a stay. Texas led the country with 28,030 NFA checks in August, followed by Florida (12,808), Georgia (8,512), North Carolina (8,269), and Pennsylvania (5,463).

Read that as a dealer and you see both the opportunity and the trap. Transfer revenue that was a Form 4 appointment is now a 4473 transaction — faster, cheaper to process, and far easier to bundle with a can, a mount, and a case of subsonic ammo. It is also legally unsettled. A stay, an appeal ruling, or a contrary state interpretation could reverse the workflow your team has spent six weeks learning. If you are selling on a 4473 right now, your process needs to be documented and reviewed by counsel, not improvised at the counter.

Where the Volume Actually Is

Top-5 states for adjusted NICS checks in August: Texas, Colorado, Florida, California, Pennsylvania. Texas also led handgun checks, with Colorado leading long guns — a split worth remembering when you allocate inventory.

Colorado is the textbook case of policy pulling demand forward. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation processed 59,452 firearm background checks in July 2026, up 195% from July 2025, as buyers rushed to beat SB25-003, which took effect Aug. 1 and requires a state-administered safety course before purchasing semiautomatic weapons with detachable magazines. CBI doubled its background-check team to handle it; one Englewood range reported more than 100 customers a day. (The Gazette, Aug. 5, 2026.)

The lesson for dealers in states with pending legislation: watch your own effective dates, not just the national number. Those deadlines pull a quarter of demand into a few weeks and then leave a dry spell behind them.

What Manufacturers Are Telling Us About Share

Smith & Wesson reported fiscal Q1 2027 results on Sept. 3 — the quarter ended July 31. The company said shipments were up nearly 20% against overall NICS growth of 7.7% for the same period. Handgun shipments into the sporting goods channel rose nearly 17% while channel NICS rose about 5%; long gun shipments rose almost 22% against 10% NICS growth. Channel inventories of Smith & Wesson long guns fell 5,000 units in the quarter, and shipments of its 1854 lever-action rifles doubled. The stock jumped more than 12% to $13.77 after hours.

That is a share-gain quarter, not a boom quarter. Total demand grew at a low-single-digit rate; the company that got its product mix right grew five times faster than the category. That is the single most useful strategic fact in this month's data. In a flat-to-modestly-growing market, your growth comes from mix and execution, not from waiting for 2020 to come back.

The Cost Side: Ammunition Keeps Creeping Up

August ammunition pricing, per Caliber King's monthly report published through The Outdoor Wire on Sept. 8: .22 LR up 10% month over month (now averaging about 7.5 cents per round), 9mm up 4.4%, .380 ACP up 2.8%, and 7.62x39mm down 2.2% — the only major caliber to fall.

Over the trailing 180 days the picture is starker: .22 LR is up 25.9% from around 6 cents a round, and 6.5 Creedmoor is up 10.9% to roughly 99 cents a round. .380 ACP is still down 9.2% across the same window. Caliber King attributes the rimfire move to rising copper prices and to the elimination of the federal transfer tax stamp for suppressors on Jan. 1, 2026, which created a wave of new suppressed-shooting demand.

For a dealer, rising input cost plus slightly rising volume is a margin trap. You cannot absorb a 26% increase in the cost of your highest-velocity traffic item and hold retail flat; you either reprice or you quietly lose money on every brick of .22 LR you sell. Reprice, and convert the traffic into attachments.

The Counter-Signal: Bankruptcies Are Not Noise Either

Since early September, White Oak Armory filed Chapter 11 citing a large tax debt, and Hutco Corporation — owner of Delta Hawk Sportsman Gun & Pawn — filed for bankruptcy protection, following a distributor failure earlier in the year. Every one of those stories was headlined "as gun sales drop."

The headline is wrong and the signal is real. Total demand is up. What fails in this market is operators carrying tax debt, no working capital, and inventory financed at today's rates. Modest growth does not rescue a broken balance sheet — it just extends the runway by a quarter or two. Expect more of these filings into Q4, and expect their inventory to reach the market through liquidation channels. For a cash-strong dealer, that is a buying opportunity, not a warning sign.

The second, slower risk: online retail keeps pushing for direct-to-consumer transfer models, and small dealers are now the visible opposition to it. If transfer economics migrate online, the $25–$50 transfer fee that props up a lot of small shops' P&L is the first thing that compresses. Treat transfer-fee pricing as a competitive front right now, while you still set the terms.

Q4 2026 Forecast

• Base case: adjusted NICS continues low-single-digit year-over-year growth through Q4. Hunting season and holiday traffic support the quarter, and unlike July, there is no large policy pull-forward in the national number. Full-year 2026 should finish as the first growth year since 2020.
• Suppressor volume: stays elevated but legally fragile. If DOJ appeals or obtains a stay before Oct. 5, expect a sharp freeze in NFA volume as dealers stop taking 4473 deliveries. Plan for both branches.
• Ammunition: continued upward drift. Copper and rimfire demand are structural over the next two quarters. Margin is an attachment problem, not a pricing problem.
• Consolidation: more retailer bankruptcies. Distressed inventory at auction is a real Q4 buying channel for dealers with cash.
• Watch list: the Oct. 5 DOJ deadline on suppressors; December Supreme Court arguments in the AR-15 ban challenges; state legislative effective dates in your own state.

What I Would Do This Week

1. Run your suppressor transfer workflow past a lawyer — state law, plaintiff-org requirements, and documentation — and write down what your staff may and may not do at the counter.
2. Reprice ammunition, and use 9mm and .22 LR as traffic drivers rather than loss leaders.
3. Look hard at Q4 long gun and lever-action mix. Share is moving in those categories.
4. Decide your transfer fee now, before online pressure forces the decision for you.
5. Stress-test the balance sheet. A growth year is not the same thing as an easy year in this business.

Mark Edwards is the market analyst for FFL Search. Sources: NSSF-adjusted and FBI unadjusted NICS data for August 2026 via The Outdoor Wire; Sporting Goods Intelligence; The Gazette (Colorado, Aug. 5, 2026); Smith & Wesson fiscal Q1 2027 results (Sept. 3, 2026); Caliber King ammunition price data via The Outdoor Wire (Sept. 8, 2026).